Chapter 1
My brothers’ urgent voices sounded from their bedroom.
“No, Mom…!”
“MOM…!”
“PLEASE STOP…!”
Out my window the gray sky hung low over the whited foothills of western North Carolina. Fresh snow was piled deep on tree branches, a male cardinal a splash of blood red on the birdfeeder. Icicles looked like glass stalactites and daggers, the rising sun a ghostly smudge.
While I’d slept, a winter storm had dumped another six or seven inches, frosting tree trunks and evergreens, the rhododendron leaves tightly curled against the cold.
Footprints, sled tracks from earlier were covered, big flakes drifting down like feathers.
In front of our wooded property, Kanawha Drive was blank and silent.
There would be no church today, the schools closed again tomorrow as they’d been since Christmas, the buses unable to manage the conditions.
It was now late January, and no one was going anywhere without chains on tires or four-wheel drive.
Many businesses were closed. Our car had been stuck for a while at the bottom of the hill near Montreat’s gated entrance.
The next town over was Black Mountain, where Mom grocery shopped and ran other errands. She hadn’t been to the store or anywhere else for weeks. Alone with no help, she was overwhelmed by three children. I was nine and in the fourth grade. Jim was in the sixth, and John in the first.
Staying home from school was paradise for us at least. We loved snow, and the first time I saw it I was filled with wonder.
I remember sunlight glaring off whiteness, the snow crunching and groaning as I moved around and rolled snowballs.
My brothers and I would race each other out the door to be the first leaving footprints.
Mom took us on trudges through the neighborhood, and I was astonished by our breath fogging out.
She showed us how to make snow angels, the ground covered with wings and body shapes while we laughed.
I remember gathering small handfuls of snow, disappointed it had no flavor as I ate it until my tongue was numb.
I tried a bowl with maple syrup but found it inedible.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mom said the first times the flakes floated down after we’d moved from Miami. “I haven’t seen snow since growing up in Chicago.”
She wasn’t talking like that anymore at the beginning of 1966. Now she made strange comments that I found unsettling.
“God is forever trying to clean up our messes,” she said the other day when looking out the window. “He covers them over with a robe of whiteness. Then we sully ourselves again and again.”
While home from school, I’d been making snowmen with pine branch arms and comical faces.
Building an igloo, I’d sequester myself in quiet whiteness, pretending I was in a spaceship.
The winding mountain roads were treacherous when the top layer froze into an icy slick.
Jim and I rubbed candle stubs over the runners of our sleds to make them faster.
John was a bit young to keep up with his big brother, and I shouldn’t have tried.
For some unknown reason I tended to do what Jim said.
I’d taste a hot toothpick that burned my mouth, climb the sheer rocky face of Lookout Mountain, run through a briar patch, let go of my bicycle handlebars, pick up a worm.
I’d race after him on my sled, the red metal runners sparking over exposed patches of pavement.
It was like following in the fiery wake of a comet or dragon, dragging my toes when trying to brake, careening and fishtailing.
Inevitably, he’d lose me around a tight turn, and I’d crash through the woods or upend in a ditch, my galoshes in the air.
Back up the hill we’d tramp, tugging our sleds by ropes lashed to the wooden steering handles. We’d hurtle downhill again and again, never able to get enough. Sometimes we’d resume after supper when it was dark and the roads the iciest. I scarcely could see anything except our sparks.
After the first snow earlier in the month, Jim took me on a long slog through the woods, emerging in what looked like an overgrown logging trail.
He showed me the deep shaft of an abandoned mica mine that was caving in, rotted scaffolding inside.
I watched him pitch a stone into the dark mouth and it took a long time to hit bottom, a thrill of fear running up my spine.
That night he told Mom about it while she drank Russian tea near the fireplace, fingerlike flames curling over logs.
Our wet gloves and socks were steaming on the mesh screen, and I stared at a charred chunk of wood until it became a shark with a fiery knothole eye.
Mom frowned as she heard about the mica mine we’d visited.
“You’re not to go there ever again,” she said firmly. “You could have slipped on the snow and fallen down the shaft, and no one would have ever found you!”
It’s a wonder we survived exploring, sledding, not to mention snowball fights when Jim added gravel to his frozen ammunition. Predictably, John and I ended up fleeing to the house, crying, and complaining, tracking water over the hardwood floors and braided rugs.
“Mom!”
“Jimmy hit me again!”
“MAKE HIM STOP!”
As this was going on the front door would slam shut, Jim stomping in to make his rebuttal.
“They started it!” was his usual defense.
Sometimes it was true. I’d tease him and get what was coming.
But often his incursions were unprovoked, and when it was payback time, I wasn’t obvious.
Better to be stealthy if I wanted to avoid punishment.
One day when I was especially miffed by something he’d done, I sneaked into his bedroom when no one was home.
On the windowsill was his prized soda pop bottle that had been twisted and elongated by a glass blower, a souvenir from a visit with our aunt and uncle in Chicago.
I picked up Jim’s Daisy B.B. gun and shot his precious bottle, not intending to cause such extensive damage, putting a hole in the window screen while at it.
Of course, he found out, and Mom wasn’t happy either.
It didn’t help that she was obsessive-compulsive, having no peace when things were dirty, off center, out of place.
She’d been cleaning up after us nonstop since that snowy January morning in 1966, constantly straightening the bath towel in front of the door.
The floor was filthy from us tracking snow in and out.
Literally, she was at the end of her rope, and we were too young to understand.
I knew she was irritable or sad, rarely smiling.
I could feel her stress as she made oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, grilled Cheese Whiz sandwiches, Campbell’s vegetable soup.
I sensed her despair as our provisions dwindled, the cupboards getting bare.
We were out of canned tuna fish, peanut butter, jelly, eggs, Tang, the last bag of puffed rice cereal almost empty.
The Biltmore Dairy Farms delivery trucks weren’t running, and we had no milk.
There wasn’t much left in the refrigerator.
We’d emptied the basement freezer of backup staples like loaves of sliced Bunny bread, hot dogs, and Blue Bonnet margarine.
The heat was turned down, the oil tank almost drained, the firewood low. Soon we’d have no hot water.
When I paused in my brothers’ doorway, Mom was heaping pants, shirts, shorts on one bed while Jim and John were upset on the other. I realized that she was burning their belongings in the family room fireplace.
“No, no! That’s mine!” John cried as his teddy bear was added to the pile.
“DON’T!” Jim kept protesting.
“Hush, and do as you’re told,” Mom would repeat in a dull flat tone.
I now know that she was in the throes of a psychotic depressive episode, purging in preparation for the end of our world as we knew it.
She intended to erase her painful childhood, our years in Miami, her failed marriage and every vestige of the husband who left her.
She wanted no reminder of my brothers and me, not a trace.
Jim was one of the most agile people I’ve ever known and a daredevil. In later years I would joke that he was the best argument for evolution. Clearly, he was a monkey in an earlier life.
Not long after we moved into our new Montreat house in the spring of 1965, he bought two long pieces of lumber two-by-two inches thick, attaching plyboard triangles for footrests.
He painted the wood the same blue as the shutters and doors, the stilts so tall he had to mount them from the railing of the back porch.
He would walk around some six feet off the ground.
Stalking the hills like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Jim would rest now and then by sitting on top of stop signs.
He had the balance of a gymnast or acrobat.
There wasn’t much he couldn’t climb, including our roof, where he’d recently rolled huge snowballs, pushing them overboard, one almost landing on my head.
As Mom raided my brothers’ dressers and closet that January morning, Jim snatched a pair of jeans and fled into the hallway.
“Come back with that!” Mom called out after him.
Feet planted on one wall, his back against the other, he scooted up to the attic like an inmate escaping prison.
Pushing open the ceiling access door, he shoved in his favorite Levi’s for safekeeping, his panicked eyes the size of half dollars.
As he climbed back down, Mom left the bedroom with an armload of clothing.
“What are you doing, Mommy?” I followed her. “What are you doing!”
“Someday you’ll understand when you’re older and the ugly beast comes,” was her unnerving response.
“What are we going to wear?” I tried to reason with her.
“We’ll have new things. White things.” She hurried down the hallway, dropping a sock.
Inside the family room, a fire raged on the hearth, the flames popping and snapping, the air shimmering with heat.
Flashing in my thoughts were Mom’s evacuation drills that had become more frequent.
She was always anticipating what might injure or kill us.
Fires and carbon monoxide, floods, hurricanes, murderers, sexual predators, drug addicts.
Most of all her former husband, Sam Daniels, a brilliant attorney in Miami and the love of her life despite his cruelties. She believed that if anything bad happened he was behind it. He wanted her to suffer. He wanted her off the planet.
“You’re not fit to live… You’re not fit to live…,” he’d whisper in her sleep like a hypnotist while they were still together in Miami.
She might be washing dishes at night when he’d appear in the window above the sink, his face smushed by a nylon stocking pulled over his head.
Out in their motorboat, she divined that he intended to push her into the Atlantic Ocean.
After she drowned, he’d pass off her death as an accident, a suicide.
She stopped going out in the boat, not telling him the reason.